Page 12 - Packaging News magazine July-August 2022

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COVER STORY | www.packagingnews.com.au | July – August 2022
Purpose-led for people,
planet and prosperityI
The story of tna’s journey from Australian packaging equipment N the Australian packaging
pioneer to global food processing and packaging solutions giant is as inspiring as it is heart-warming, with the company’s success mirrored by its generous philanthropic pursuits. Lindy Hughson writes.
industry, the captivating tale of tna’s founding four decades ago, and its early efforts to catapult its pioneering rotary bag filling technology onto the global stage is widely known, but certainly
bears repeating.
In 1982, Alf and Nadia Taylor, newly
partnered in a romantic sense and highly driven in a business sense, started a small consulting engineer- ing firm for the snack food industry. And then, one now-famous night in a Bankstown pub, engineer Alf sketched a rough design on the back of a beer coaster for a new rotary vertical filling machine for packaging snacks.
It was an idea that, once engineered into a working rotary motion vertical filler in the form of the first prototype tna robag, broke new ground in snack packaging by doubling the filling speed of rectilinear motion systems used at the time. Smiths was the first company to snap up the technology locally, purchasing 34 machines in a $2.4m order – it was the turning point for the fledgling tna and ultimately, the catalyst for its global expansion.
Speaking to PKN during AUSPACK in May, where tna hosted one of the first global events to mark its 40-year milestone, MD & CEO Alf Taylor said, “While we realised early in the game that we had to be global, as Australia’s potential market base for the robag was too small, we could never have foreseen that we would be this successful.
“Building on our manufacturing base in Melbourne, we launched the global business in the UK in the mid ‘90s and today, four decades on, we have 32 offices with 500-plus sales and support staff – we call them tna ambassadors – with customers in 135 countries.”
Alf went on to relate that once tna started building its geographical foot- print, the next step was to expand its product range, and then acquire com- panies with technology and principles that are a fit with the company’s core values of simplicity, performance, and flexibility. Among those acquisitions, totalling seven to date, are leading processing names like FOODesign,
ABOVE: Alf and Nadia Taylor celebrated tna’s 40th anniversary with partners and customers in Melbourne in May.
RIGHT: People, planet and prosperity are the motivational building blocks of tna’s business.